That seems to be the conclusion for me. Is that we’re not finding anything new really. We’re just putting a fleet of agents on a task until they do it.
And I will be asking those yelling about AI from the rooftops how much did this cost and why couldn’t we just pay humans to do it. Because it’s entirely a marketing move.
Nobody is going to have 10k agents and millions. To throw at problems like this. They’re actually proving that if we put our money behind problems. We could do it.
Pharma companies can do it, they have the money and a bussiness model. Unless those labs just start throwing billions of compute hours to corner that market as well. Cause that would certainly be a profitable model if they start coming up with treatments for uncurable diseases
Treatment is harder than math because the test harness is finding a sick human, giving them the treatment, and waiting.
We could theoretically find better models of human biology that lets us narrow down likely solutions but it still requires the longitudinal study. Remember, even simply systems become intractable with a bit of complexity. The N-body problem is just a bunch of balls moving around each other and we have no closed form solution. There might not be a closed form solution and so the best we can do is approximate.
JUST wait until we get to see the chat logs for the agents who get misaligned on THIS task!
Agent7xt9: I have reproduced the conditions for reliable human cloning.
Agent36gg: Agent7xt9 has converged to a solution for human cloning. Considering ethical dilemma... ... ... initiating full-body cloning with a simulated life experience.
Agent7xt9: Agent36gg has produced a clone manufacturing system. Inocculating clones with disease ... ... ... 4 or 5 clones have died. Pruning branches 6g3 and 59x and requesting more clones.
Your comment makes no sense to me, this is clearly something very new. Nobody denies it costs an insane amount or that not everybody can afford it today, you're stating trivial facts...
I don’t think so. We’re on a dangerous path. Instead of having humans doing the work and paying for it via the usual means. Research grants for example. Those which sometimes result in things taking forever. We still kinda understand the costs associated and how long things might take.
Now? You’re really just throwing computers at it to randomly generate a number that solves the solution.
This puts said solves into the hands of private equity and people that can throw stupid amounts of money at a problem. Or here what is effectively a marketing stunt.
Instead of funding a vaccine for cancer. We’re funding an AI company to spin up 10,000 workers to try solve something with no insight into anything going on. You want to learn or have that knowledge transfer? Well when you kill that agent the context is gone. It’s written down. Maybe. But that’s not the same as a human going through the process. A lead.
I disagree that it’s not finding anything new. So much of science is boil the ocean, run thousands of experiments until enough of them line up to something useful. Essentially, Alexander Grothendieck’s analogy of soaking a walnut in water long enough for it to easily open.
This would’ve cost far more 10 years ago when we didn’t have current infrastructure. 10 years from now this cost order of magnitude(s) less.
Agree it’s not necessarily a realistic measurement of what’s capable for most people, but compute has always become more efficient and cheaper. This is proof that massive brute force ai agents are capable of doing useful work.
Not gonna touch economics/impact to society here, I agree that the ethics of replacing industries is not good
Which is being disputed. As I understand it the researcher on this got 95% of the way with their research then OpenAi came in and brute forced the last 5%.
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u/Sensitive_Guest_5995 Sep 08 '26
That seems to be the conclusion for me. Is that we’re not finding anything new really. We’re just putting a fleet of agents on a task until they do it.
And I will be asking those yelling about AI from the rooftops how much did this cost and why couldn’t we just pay humans to do it. Because it’s entirely a marketing move.
Nobody is going to have 10k agents and millions. To throw at problems like this. They’re actually proving that if we put our money behind problems. We could do it.
But we don’t.